SALT LAKE CITY — Americans and the world have come to realize that, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, China isn’t just another trading partner, Rep. Chris Stewart said Friday.
“They’re not just a guy across the ocean who builds really cool plastic things,” he said on KSL Newsradio’s “Live Mic.” “China has an ambition to be not just one of, but to be the single dominant influence in the world — militarily, politically, economically, diplomatically.”
Stewart said the Republican-led congressional task force he was named to Thursday has an opportunity to recognize that as it looks at issues in the U.S.-China relationship regarding coronavirus, intelligence military, education and others. Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, is also a member of the group, which held its first meeting Friday.
China was a geopolitical threat well before COVID-19, and the past few weeks have only increased the urgency to address existing and emerging threats head on, according to Stewart.
“There is a broad scope to this,” he said.
The 15-member panel was originally supposed to include Democrats, but they withdrew from the project after several months of discussion, and Republicans decided to move ahead without them.
“We were about to make an announcement about mid-February, and the day before they backed out of it, and I really don’t understand that,” Stewart said.
Jon Huntsman Jr., the former U.S. ambassador to China, said on “Live Mic” that the lack of bipartisanship on the task force concerns him because “the Chinese know how to divide and conquer. They’ll know exactly that it isn’t a unified group.”
Huntsman said if Congress can’t figure how to make the coronavirus a matter of national interest, then “something has gone horribly wrong.”
“What would really resonate with the Chinese as opposed to another working group or task force, which they’re probably not going to take too terribly seriously, would be a unified Congress making an expression about America’s outrage with respect to the coronavirus and what we are prepared to do about it long term,” he said.
China, he said, fears the U.S. when it is unified.
“They don’t fear us when we’re divided because they figure that’s never going to amount to very much at all,” he said.
Huntsman, a former GOP Utah governor who is running for his old job, said when China knew about the outbreak and for how long it withheld that information are the biggest issues facing the U.S. right now.
“They lied, and everyone suffers the implications,” he said.
Curtis said in a statement Thursday there is a need for a unified and bipartisan voice on China and hoped the Democrats would soon join the group.
Stewart, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the China task force is different from other congressional working groups. He said he has dedicated one staff member to work on it full time.
“This one’s got teeth,” he said. “We will have the backbone to actually create something.”
Stewart the group would produce a “readable” report to help inform people about the challenge China poses to the U.S. and also craft legislation to deal with some of the issues.